Sleepless Again: Or What the World of Yesterday Says About Trump’s Attack on Venezuela and the World of Today

“[…] our universe had become accustomed to inhumanity, to lawlessness, and brutality as never in centuries before.”

– Stefan Zweig, The World of Yesterday

Things don’t happen randomly. The shocking news of Donald Trump’s attack on Venezuela broke on the 101^stanniversary of Benito Mussolini’s announcement to the Italian parliament accepting full responsibility for blackshirt violence and declaring himself dictator of Italy. That gesture—greeted by applause, complicit silence, and opportunistic support—ushered in fascism, the Spanish Civil War, and the Second World War. History isn’t a machine, automatically repeating itself, but it does rhyme, as Mark Twain is said to have commented. And sometimes it rhymes in macabre ways.

Stefan Zweig was one of the first to see this. In his 1914 essay “The Sleepless World” published in the collection Messages from a Lost World: Europe on the Brink and composed before and during the Second World War, he describes a civilisation that can’t sleep because it no longer trusts itself. This insomnia isn’t a malady of individuals but a symptom of systemic collapse. The world can’t sleep when violence ceases to be the exception to become method, and when lying ceases to be an aberration to become state policy.

In The World of Yesterday, written in exile and posthumously published in 1942, Zweig develops this insight into his testimony and bequest, with a book that is an ethical autopsy of the liberal, cosmopolitan, and humanist Europe which naively believed that technical progress would automatically lead to moral progress. He describes how aggrieved nationalism, the cult of power, and contempt for truth pave the way for fascism, not as an accident but as the logical product of an epoch.

Zweig knew that fascism doesn’t start with bombs. It starts with applause. It doesn’t begin with extermination camps. It begins with legitimation of exception, of “necessary” violence, and of the convenient lie.

It’s not impossible to see how all this is at work in today’s world, even when we’re stunned like a deer in headlights.

Donald Trump’s attack on Venezuela, announced, commended, and legitimised in public statements made by none other than Trump himself, opens up a new level of global lawlessness. An attack on a sovereign Latin American nation, the sequestering of its president and his wife, references to “our” oil, and the demand for political submission now called “transition”, undisguisedly reveal, now it’s dispensing with old rhetorical scruples, how the imperial logic has never ceased to operate.

Any moralistic touch of words like “dictatorship”, “freedom”, and “democracy” is sugaring the pill. The focus isn’t hidden: Venezuelan oil, the world’s largest reserves. As in other times, “democracy” is invoked only if it coincides with the empire’s economic interests. Otherwise, it is unceremoniously junked.

US hypocrisy isn’t episodic but structural. The country that calls itself the world’s greatest democracy has constructed its hegemony by installing and supporting dictatorships, sponsoring and funding coups, underpinning authoritarian regimes, making deals with all sorts of criminals as long as they serve its policy and, right now, complicity in genocide. Venezuela fits the pattern as just one more chapter in a long history of colonial and neocolonial pillage.

In this context, the granting of the Nobel Peace Prize to María Corina Machado has played a decisive symbolic role. By awarding a person who presents herself as an alternative to the elected Venezuelan government and who publicly expresses her gratitude to Trump for helping her to gain such distinguished recognition, the Nobel Foundation made its contribution to international endorsement of the attack. The Prize, far from fostering peace, once again paves the way for war, as happens so often when supposedly peace-loving institutions, wittingly or unwittingly go along with the logic of power.

With characteristic perverse petulance, Trump lobbied for months to be given the Nobel Prize and when it went to an opposition leader of one of his top black-list countries, he claimed that Machado said she was accepting it in his honour because he was the one who really deserved it. But Trump is the world leader with a National Security Strategy that clearly says there are no allies now, but only interests so, after his attack on Venezuela he threw Machado to the wolves, saying she doesn’t have the “respect” of her country to govern. So he says he will “run” Venezuela with his own henchmen, apparently including US secretary of state, Marco Rubio, defence secretary, Pete Hegseth, and the joint chiefs of staff chair, Gen Dan “Razin” Caine. This isn’t mere bravado but a naked expression of the lesson learned from Mussolini, that violence doesn’t always need to be justified. It only has to be announced.

In Latin America, those applauding his coup are no surprise. In Brazil, far-right governors of several states—Ratinho Jr. (Paraná), Ronaldo Caiado (Goiás), Romeu Zema (Minas Gerais), and Tarcísio de Freitas (São Paulo)—flunkies of empire, did what was expected of them and, in their particular nauseating style, rushed to applaud their fellow criminal.

In their states they understand these things. Their police, militias, and thugs kill poor Black people in slums, landless workers, and Indigenous people, while in their self-made cesspools they prattle about “freedom” and “democracy” even though liberal verbiage can’t cover up the everyday practice of murder.

Of these Four Horsemen, Tarcísio de Freitas, the worst of the bearers of pestilence, is a military man trained in the culture of the coup d’etat, an unscrupulous, profiteering governor, up to his neck in corruption schemes based on privatisation of public assets in São Paulo, a sadist who publicly celebrates police killings, and open admirer of torturers of Brazil’s military dictatorship. This man offers to help the US with the “transition to democracy in Venezuela”.

In online sites, today’s platform-states underpinning contemporary falsolatry and plundering neocolonialism, Brazil’s sleazy far-right yes-men are having a field day applauding what mainstream media outlets are describing as Trump’s “audacious” commandeering of Venezuela. Indifferent when their own people are massacred, they rejoice in this latest attempt to humiliate a kindred country.

Stefan Zweig would immediately recognise the situation. He knew that fascism never requires intelligence but only blind emotional loyalty. It doesn’t demand truth but only belief. It doesn’t want learning but only rancour. The world is again sleepless because it is now seeing—too late—that barbarism doesn’t gatecrash. It’s invited.

The same old fascists.
The same vicious fools with no regard for human life.
The same vassals who’ve learned and remember nothing.
The same coup-plotting trash dressed up as leaders.

We can’t recover the world of yesterday, that’s for sure. And today’s insomnia doesn’t let us dream. But we must stay alert and ready for action to defend, in any way we can, true democracy, the sovereignty of peoples, and solidarity. Or, in other words, liberty, equality, and fraternity.

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